The Hero of Day Care : Bill Ewing Has Built in Pomona a Child-Care Program Unmatched in Scope and Diversity

IT IS 7:30 a.m. in Pomona, and the morning dew still clings to the climbing bars and empty bike stands around Allison Elemen tary School. The school is silent, its doors still locked. Classes won’t begin for another hour.

But on one corner of the campus, at the Allison Children’s Center, more than a dozen children have already finished a breakfast of fruit, cereal and milk and are hard at play, building castle cities and frontier stockades out of Lego and Lincoln Logs. Many of them have been at the center since it opened at 6:30 a.m, and in an hour some will head for school, while others, preschoolers, will arrive to take their places, grabbing for spare jigsaw puzzles, making scratch-paper airplanes, watching TV cartoons or drifting into another room for a nap on a canvas cot.

Allison is one of 15 child-care centers in Pomona that serve 900 children in 12 different programs. Working mothers with babies head for Park West High School, where infants are cuddled and fed on demand by eight matronly attendants. Toddlers go to Trinity United Methodist Church. Preschoolers get a Montessori-based program at five locations around town (including Allison). Teen-age mothers take their children to a nursery next to the school where they study for high-school equivalency certificates. Six centers serve the 200 children enrolled in federally funded Head Start programs. There are programs for abused children and centers conveniently located near freeway on-ramps for commuter parents. One center, open until midnight, also offers care on weekends and holidays, and includes a mini-infirmary, complete with nurse, for children with non-contagious maladies. From 6 a.m. till midnight, seven days a week all year round, for children age 6 weeks to 14 years, Pomona offers some kind of child care.

In a state that leads the nation in public child-care programs, Pomona is tops. “California has a wider range of programs that are better financed and have higher operational standards than any other state,” says David Weikart, president of High / Scope, an Ypsilanti, Mich., foundation that studies the national effect of early childhood education. “It has improved licensing standards, raised teacher training requirements, and in places like Pomona instituted a truly quality program of child care.”

Anne Mitchell, co-director of the Public School Early Childhood Study, the first major investigation into the breadth and quality of public day care in America, agrees. “Pomona child care is extraordinary compared to the rest of the country,” she says. “A few enterprising districts try to approach what Pomona does, but they don’t even come close.”

Nationally and statewide, what sets the Pomona system apart is its scope and diversity. The L.A. child-care system may serve more children and wield a larger budget, but it offers only five programs to Pomona’s 12. Riverside County’s Office of Education equals Pomona in number of programs, but it can’t match it in diversity. Berkeley, like Pomona, has a center for the mildly ill, but doesn’t offer evening child care. Albany has special-education classes for preschoolers, but has no respite care for abused children, and all its facilities close on weekends. And so on through the state.

“We do a $320-million business with 900 agencies throughout California, and I can say without reservation that Pomona is our exemplary model of how children should be served,” says Dr. Robert Cervantes, director of the state Department of Education’s child-development division. “Pomona represents the optimum of what can be done in child care in California.”

Like all the top programs nationally, Pomona spends more than the average per child ($4,500 as against $3,000), it pays its staff members well ($26,000 a year against a national average of $9,000 a year), it hires specially trained teachers (an early-childhood credential is a requirement), it has low staff turnover rates (a majority have been there for a decade; nationally, child-care workers have a 42% turnover rate, the highest of any occupation listed by the Labor Department), and it consistently scores high on state quality evaluations.

The school board in Pomona is justifiably proud of the system it sponsors. “Child care benefits the community as a whole,” asserts Nancy J. McCracken, a member of the board for the past six years. She can explain the secret of Pomona’s day-care success. “The creation and expansion of our child-care network, “ she says, “has resulted, in large measure, from the imagination and financial ability of one man, Bill Ewing.”

AT FIRST glance, Bill Ewing seems an unlikely hero of day care or anything else. He is a slightly balding 52-year-old stamp collector with a mellow Southern drawl, and his entire being bespeaks moderation. In meetings and memos he seldom implores and never insists. Indeed, the only time he raises his voice is to sing tenor solos for the Ontario United Methodist Church choir. Yet for the past 17 years as administrator of Pomona’s child-development programs, he has been California’s child-care champion.

The son of a paper-mill worker, Bill Ewing grew up poor in West Monroe, La. His parents were staunch Southern Baptists who spent Wednesday evenings and most of Sunday at church, singing hymns and churning the torpid air with hand-held fans donated by a local funeral home.

Driven by the image of his father working long hours in the 120-degree heat of a pulp mill, Ewing decided to become a teacher while studying at Northeast Louisiana State College. “The baby boom had caused a national shortage of teachers at every level of education,” he recalls. “Teaching offered upward mobility, the opportunity to go anywhere and insurance against ever having to work in the pulp mill.”

Still, after he received his BA in education in 1959, Ewing followed his first impulse: to go into social work. The summer following his graduation, he roamed the cane fields of St. Mary’s Parish in south Louisiana, processing disability claims and expediting welfare checks. For a young man who had “grown up in the church,” it was satisfying work.

But the lure of teaching, and the higher salaries it offered, remained strong. When Freeport Nickel Co. in New Orleans offered him a job teaching fourth grade at its Moa Bay Mining subsidiary in Cuba the following au tumn, Ewing and his 18-year-old wife, Becky, didn’t hesitate. “The $400-a-month salary was almost twice what I could earn in Louisiana,” he remembers. “We got a free week in New Orleans and five nights at the Hotel Nacional in Havana.”

The excitement of revolutionary Cuba quickly dissipated when Ewing arrived on Cuba’s Atlantic coast. Surrounded by jungle and besieged by swarms of biting midges, the company school had only five fourth-graders. When Fidel Castro nationalized the $90-million mine six months later, Ewing returned to the United States and accepted a teaching job in Roswell, N.M. The next year, he moved to Belridge, a tiny district with one school 40 miles west of Bakersfield. “My third-grade class had 18 wonderful students, but after commuting through tule fog for two years it was time to move on,” Ewing says. His new destination was Pomona. In 1964, he got an assignment there teaching children with learning disabilities.

After three years in special education, Ewing returned to the elementary classroom as a social-science and music instructor. At Montvue Elementary School, he introduced his students to operettas such as “Hansel and Gretel” and sponsored an evening astronomy class. When Apollo astronauts began advancing toward the moon in 1969, Ewing and 40 fifth-graders followed their progress through a telescope he persuaded the PTA to buy.

Ewing’s enthusiasm made him popular with students and their parents. His efforts as Montvue’s representative for the Pomona teachers’ association made him a favorite among his peers. Ewing wasn’t sure how he rated with the school administration. In the spring of 1968, after carefully making sure he had tenure and a contract for the following year, he had stood up at a board meeting and publicly complained that administrators were consuming money that could be better spent in the classroom.

Then in 1971, he decided he’d like to try an administrative position himself. The job of child-development supervisor opened, and Ewing applied. His superiors were surprised that he wanted a job they all deemed “women’s work.” It would be a nightmare of distraught parents, pinkeye and runny noses, they told him. The big event of your day, they chortled, would be the afternoon nap. But the job appealed to the same combination of ambition, career pragmatism and latent social-work tendencies that had carried him from Cuba to California in the first place.

“I saw myself as a leader in education and realized that child care was a great opportunity,” Ewing says. “Sacramento seemed ready to fund more (child-care) programs. With half of the women in America already working outside the home, it was a field that was bound to grow.”

When Ewing took charge of Pomona’s $65,000 child-development budget in November, 1971, the city had one center serving 53 disadvantaged children. His office in the Pomona Children’s Center on Main Street was only slightly larger than a jail cell. His duties included mopping floors, dispensing Band-Aids and monitoring the playground. Yet the more time Ewing spent with the children and their parents, the more certain he became that he had finally found his niche.

“Up until then I’d seen middle-class families once a semester on parents’ night,” Ewing says. “I’d never come into contact with child abuse. I couldn’t imagine a parent would sexually molest his child. Yet here I was dealing on a daily basis with children who were hungry, unwashed and often terribly afraid.

“Their parents were incredibly angry, and not without justification. Their lives were going nowhere. Their kids had medical and other social needs that they couldn’t provide. There was no way to avoid becoming emotionally involved. Once the children had a little food and a bath their vitality would blossom. They had an innocence, a spontaneity, that cried out for protection. I remember standing in the middle of a room crowded with preschoolers, overwhelmed by their excitement. At that moment I knew that if I could improve their quality of life, the entire community would benefit.”

Ewing’s immersion in the Pomona Children’s Center produced an epiphany of sorts. He could no longer accept the Pomona school superintendent’s goal of expanding child care gradually with whatever money the state would allow. “I had a vision that quality child care should be available to every parent in need,” Ewing says. “There would be a nursery for babies, a sick bay for the ill, and after-school centers where teen-agers could socialize. My staff would be highly trained, well-paid and bilingual if possible. Everything depended on finding teachers who loved children and were fascinated by their development.”

At the end of each day, after the parents had come for their children and his four female staffers had gone home, Ewing began to study the laws and pending legislation relating to child care. To his delight, he discovered that thousands of dollars were available to districts that submitted credible proposals. He could apply for state money to create programs, then use budget increases to expand them. In 1972, he requested and was given money that allowed the district’s one center to begin staying open evenings. The following year, he opened California’s first state-subsidized infant-care center with $60,000 from California’s General Child Development Fund. Designed to serve single mothers unable to stay home after their babies were born, the nursery became a model in the state for others that followed.

By the end of 1973, Ewing’s programs were caring for 125 children with a budget three times the size of the one he had inherited. But despite this expansion, Pomona still served only 10% of the families in need. For every child admitted into day care, nine others had to be placed on the waiting list. The problem, Ewing had begun to realize, was not lack of state funds, but the way state funds were distributed.

Every time the state put more money into existing child-care programs, the Department of Education’s Child Development Unit distributed that money by increasing each school district’s budget by an equal, fixed percentage. The system helped big-budget districts in Long Beach, Los Angeles and Pasadena whose child-care programs--and funding base--dated back to World War II. But it hurt districts like Pomona that were just getting into child care. Ewing wanted to make demographics a factor in funding, otherwise the relative inequity would continue. So he set about constructing a strategy.

“Sacramento seemed willing to consider a new policy, but I had to be careful not to offend anybody,” Ewing says. “An outright attack on established districts would prompt a negative response. I had to write a position paper that called for change in a positive way.”

Armed with census reports and school-district surveys, Ewing began to compose his arguments in early 1974. He did not challenge the districts with long-established child-development programs directly. Rather, he argued on behalf of the children of California whose needs could not be satisfied until declining family incomes, impoverished single parents, teen-age pregnancy and local inflation became factors in the funding process. He scribbled notes on legal pads at night, and Becky retyped them the following morning. During the afternoon nap at the center, he lobbied colleagues from the California Child Development Administrators Assn. via telephone. His argument in favor of demographic-based funding finally emerged in the form of a four-page proposal for a plan he called General Expansion by Competition.

“How could people argue with a competitive process in which everyone had equal footing?” Ewing says. Indeed, nobody could, and later that year Sacramento decided to distribute new money to existing child-development programs based on statistically proven need. And Ewing had learned to get what he wanted. He was on his way to becoming a master of the bureaucracy.

The expansion his proposal brought to Pomona caused an unexpected problem. As the number of children in the system grew, it became apparent that the staff couldn’t care for more than a few children older than 15 months in the infant center: The toddlers were too rambunctious. And their lack of toilet training and inability to feed themselves made them unwelcome in rooms reserved for preschoolers. Ewing wanted a special center for toddlers, but once again the rules wouldn’t allow it. State programs were clustered in categories to serve either infants, preschoolers or school-age children. There was no category for toddlers, and thus no money could be specifically allotted for them.

“I had 20 toddlers and no place to put them,” Ewing remembers with a smile. “If I wanted extra funds, I had to propose something innovative.”

So Ewing suggested that the state create a new category to serve the needs of toddlers. And as its first program, he suggested starting a “toddler transition” center in Pomona that would allow groups of children 15 to 30 months old to gradually acquire the developmental skills they’d need as preschoolers. The Department of Education rewarded the idea with a $40,000 grant.

Throughout the early 1970s, a majority of the school board approved additions to Pomona’s network of children’s centers. Ewing and all his ideas had first to pass the board’s scrutiny before they made it to the state. By the beginning of 1976, he was administering a $450,000 program that cared for more than 200 children. He didn’t hit a snag until that summer.

Ewing proposed that Pomona use $175,000 in state money to multiply the number of child-care sites in the city by incorporating private family day-care homes into the system. Several members who had assented to his earlier plans opposed this one, insisting that it would be far more difficult to regulate care in private homes than to control the district centers.

“Public education is getting into everything,” school trustee Don Donnelly complained during one heated debate in July, 1976. “Next you’ll be asking us to get into prenatal care.”

“But the need is so great in Pomona,” Ewing responded. “Most of the people this will help are single parents.”

“Then they should assume their family obligation,” Donnelly said, voicing the majority sentiment. “This thing allows people to cop out on the responsibilities of parenthood.”

It was his first and only defeat.

As the years passed and women began to replace men on Pomona’s school board, the enthusiasm for child care began to grow. “The board didn’t realize initially how savvy Ewing was,” Donnelly remembers. “We just looked at child care and thought, ‘This isn’t education.’ It’s hard to appreciate the value of something like child care when you never give it a chance.”

Donnelly, now a firefighter for L.A. County, eventually became one of Ewing’s strongest backers. “I finally realized the challenge was not to get students into college but to achieve basic literacy. I’d hate to think what the town would be like today without day care.”

FOR THE families in Pomona who use the day-care system created by Ewing, how he did it doesn’t really matter. Only that he has succeeded. Since that moment of failure in 1976, Ewing has added money, programs and families to his system. He now serves 20% of the families in need (with a waiting list of 1,000 children) in Pomona with a $3.5 million budget. He has set up a telephone information system that provides a one-stop day-care referral system that extends far beyond Pomona. More than 7,000 people from La Puente to Rancho Cucamonga used it last year alone. In 1986, he finally got his private-home day-care alternative added to the menu: Using an idea much like Vice President George Bush’s day-care campaign proposal (see box on Page 12), he offers state money vouchers to parents in western San Bernardino County who want to use private day care. He has found ways to incorporate middle-class families in a system primarily designed for the needy.

With every new program, the system has been carefully integrated with the rest of Pomona’s human services. Welfare recipients looking for employment receive free day care. So do impoverished parents enrolled in the district’s adult-education courses. When Pomona Unified decided to offer English classes to newly arrived immigrants, it was only natural that the classes be given in temporary structures alongside a mid-town day-care facility.

For Gilbert Galindo, day care is the ticket to a better job. Three years ago, he and his wife, Irma, were unemployed. Neither had marketable skills. Irma Galindo felt that they were “going nowhere.”

In 1985, while waiting for his welfare application to be approved, Galindo met a social worker who suggested that he improve his office skills through adult-education courses offered by Pomona Unified. Irma decided to enroll, as well, to obtain a high-school equivalency certificate. But it was almost impossible for the couple to attend classes and look for new jobs while caring for their four children. Finding child-care space at Madison Children’s Center in mid-town Pomona solved their problem. Both began studying business administration, and now Irma is a trainee for Sumitomo Bank while her husband is studying accounting in college.

The Galindos’ daughter and three sons go to the Madison Children’s Center every afternoon after school. They receive a snack, finish their homework and then at 4 p.m., their parents, both in school since 10 a.m., pick them up.

“Both of us have a lot more confidence now and are sure we’ll find better jobs than before,” Galindo says.

“I know our kids are happier,” his wife adds. “They used to never want to leave the house. Now they never want to come home.”

The Worcesters, middle-class Pomona-L.A. commuters, use a special program created in 1983 that allows them into the child-care system for a reasonable fee.

“Before the center opened, our family was under incredible stress,” says Roslyn Worcester, a Los Angeles-based credit analyst with Republic Factors Corp. “We seemed to be working just to support the baby-sitter. Because of the traffic, it was almost impossible to maintain a career and still have quality time with the children.”

Now Worcester or her husband, who also works in downtown Los Angeles with a discount stock brokerage, drop their son Kenny and daughter Michelle off at the Diamond Bar school at 6:30 a.m., two hours before school begins. They pick them up at 6 p.m., two hours after school is dismissed.

“Having child care available at the school is very important to me,” Worcester explains. “My daughter Michelle is very cute and can be flirtatious. I don’t want her waiting on the corner for a bus. Both children feel comfortable at the center, which they regard as an extension of their home.”

But most of the programs in the Pomona system concentrate on more basic services than latchkey centers. “The first thing we teach a child is how to clean himself,” says Mary Carrey, head teacher at the Madison Children’s Center. “Kids who never get bathed at home are washed here in the basin. We hope that once we teach the child, he then can train the mother.”

Inside the entrance of the Madison center is a bulletin board full of announcements for English lessons offered by a nearby church, a used-clothing exchange and a family crisis center. On the opposite wall, a series of simply drawn cartoons illustrate themes such as “Don’t leave children in locked cars,” “It’s safe to trust the police” and “Even poor children have the ability to learn.”

The most poignant message is perhaps the most important. It comes in the form of a poem affixed to the wall beside the basin where children are scrubbed.

A careful parent I ought to be,

For little children follow me.

I do not dare to go astray,

For fear they’ll go the self-same way.

The simple rhyme has a special meaning for Pam Sekhon. By the time she left her first husband in 1983, Sekhon had two children and a chronic drinking problem. One afternoon, a Pomona social worker arrived to find out whether she was supervising her children properly.

“I told the woman from Children’s Services that I was exhausted and needed a break,” she remembers. “When I wasn’t working or taking care of the kids I seemed to spend all of my time trying to find baby-sitters. I was desperate for child care.”

Sekhon finally got the help she needed in 1984 when a Superior Court judge placed her young son and daughter in a Pomona day-care center administered by the Pomona Unified School District. Some may have considered the court referral a rebuke, but for Sekhon it was “the miracle” that allowed her to begin building a better future.

Sekhon explains the real success of Bill Ewing: “For the first time in my life someone had actually given me something. It was an unselfish act for which I’ll always be thankful.”

Today, Sekhon’s 18-month-old daughter spends the day at an infant center near the Pomona Fairgrounds. Her two older children eat supper and spend part of the evening at Emerson Children’s Center. Sekhon, 30, is once again looking for a job. But now she can job-hunt during the day and attend a thrice-weekly alcohol and drug dependence program at night because her children are being cared for by the Pomona school system.

“Two wonderful things have enriched my life,” she says. “My kids are the first. The second is affordable child care.”

WHAT CAN BE called the nerve center of Pomona’s child care empire is an unpretentious frame house behind the Pilgrim Congregational Church in downtown Pomona. Here in a tiny back room decorated with preschool finger paintings and jammed tight with file cabinets, Bill Ewing spends 10 hours a day supervising his child-care empire and a staff of 130.

His weekly calendar, as detailed as that of any corporate attorney, reveals days spent negotiating state contracts, renewing leases and rewriting parent handbooks. Personnel matters and meetings with local principals fill spaces in the schedule.

The bureaucratic, methodical work seldom lends itself to high drama, Ewing concedes. But angry parents and playground accidents provide a few moments of excitement.

“Last Friday, the police called and said a suicidal parent with a loaded shotgun was on his way to Emerson Junior High to pick up his daughter,” Ewing says. “I went over and dismissed the staff, then stayed until their parents picked them up.” When all but one had finally been claimed, he took the child back to his office and went back to writing the proposals that bring new day-care money to Pomona.

His goal isn’t compelling prose, but concise appeals to bureaucratic logic. It’s one of his best skills. Department of Education officials say Pomona’s child-care network results in large measure from Ewing’s ability to communicate his development concepts. “Some proposals look as though they were scribbled in a phone booth with a dull pencil,” confides one Sacramento administrator. “Many are padded with totally irrelevant information or blanketed with letters from local politicians. How can you trust a person to supervise a child-care budget when he can’t even write a logical paragraph?” The penalties for bad writing can be extreme. The failure to bring in new money can quickly cripple a child-care program, as it has in Marin County, and Stockton and Redlands.

Pomona’s day-care system survives and improves not just because of proposal writing, but also because of guile and budget wizardry. After a new day-care contract with the state is signed, Ewing cajoles Pomona Unified into providing classroom space, utilities and custodial service. Then, armed with these expressions of local support, he returns to Sacramento to leverage additional money from the state. In an era of tight budgets, every dollar helps.

“The money I receive from the state does not always cover the cost of a program,” Ewing explains. “The amount I receive for each preschooler--$18.81 a day--is enough to break even. But infant care that costs me between $30 to $35 is reimbursed by the state at $26 per day. My infant center would need $9,000 a year for each baby to break even. Obviously, the state will not give me that much money. By shifting money from school-age programs where expenses are lower, I can keep the infant centers open.”

In an effort to make its child-care programs more efficient, California’s child-development division in the spring of 1986 told school districts and other public providers that they could sell unused space in their state-subsidized latchkey centers at prevailing commercial rates. The new regulation meant that a district with 65 subsidized children in a program with a capacity of 80 could sell the 15 unused spaces.

The amount a district could charge was determined by the amount the state paid for similar space. In Pomona, for example, it meant that Bill Ewing could charge a middle-class parent $67.50 a week for full-time latchkey care since that was the amount the state paid to maintain a child from an impoverished family. The rule sounded logical, and worked in Pomona, which had the foresight to place its latchkey centers in middle-class neighborhoods where $67.50 a week was close to the prevailing commercial rate. But in districts such as Pacoima, Bellflower and Compton, spaces went begging because a weekly fee of $67 was far above the commercial rate, far in excess of what families could afford to pay.

Local administrators and officials in Sacramento realized that the rule needed changing, but neither could see a way around California’s Constitution, which prohibits using public funds to subsidize those who don’t qualify for public assistance.

Once more, Ewing was able to see the big picture. “It was November of 1987 and I was in the middle of a latchkey meeting in Sacramento when I realized we would never be able to compete with the private sector in low-income areas,” Ewing remembers. “It was like a light bulb suddenly came on. I stood up and said we’d made a big mistake in failing to take our administrative costs into account. Fifteen percent of that $67 went for administrative costs. Non-subsidized children didn’t require all that paper work. If we charged these children 15% less--the actual cost of their program--we could be more competitive with private child care.”

To the delight of the Department of Education and California’s child-development administrators, Ewing set about doing what he does better than anyone: writing a position paper that could allow an expansion of child-care services. As in the past, he framed the debate in a way that makes it hard to disagree with his logic. He does not propose that the rate currently demanded by the state be lowered. Instead, Ewing proposes that “families not eligible for state subsidy may be enrolled at the actual cost of services they receive.”

And he carefully defines what full cost really means.

“The effect of Bill’s proposal would be to open California’s child care to the middle class,” says Cervantes of the Department of Education’s child-development division. “Districts won’t make money by selling these empty spaces. But resolving this legal issue will allow us to deliver more child care. By making these unused slots available we can serve from 5,000 to 10,000 more children. Bill has come up with a practical solution by which we can resolve this comparability problem immediately.”

Whatever the state decides, Ewing will undoubtedly insist that still more needs to be done. His next program, if he can find the money, is 24-hour-a-day child care. The problem with expanding the frontiers of child care, Ewing admits, is that you constantly need more funds to pay the bills. “That’s why,” he says with a wink, “whenever I hear that new money is available, I try to be the first person in line.”